Take Screen Shots from the Terminal in Mac OS X

Geek · August 11, 2011

Aside from the keyboard <a href="http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/09/screen-capture-in-mac-os-x/">shortcuts</a>, Grab, and other screen shot apps, you can also take screenshots of your Mac OS X desktop directly from the Terminal with the ‘screencapture’ command. Here’s a quick overview of this utility and how to use it.

The Basics: Taking a Screen Shot from the Terminal

First up, launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) and then type the following:

<code>screencapture test.jpg</code>

That is the most basic format of the command, it’ll take a screenshot of your entire screen and name it ‘test.jpg’ in the current working Terminal directory, which is typically your user home. You can always specify another location just by choosing a path for the screenshot, here’s the Desktop:

<code>screencapture ~/Desktop/screenshot.jpg</code>

Send the Screen Shot to the Clipboard

If you want to send the screenshot to your clipboard rather than to a file, attach the -c flag, but don’t assign a file name or path:

<code>screencapture -c</code>

Now that it’s in your clipboard you can just paste it into Preview, Photoshop, Pages, or whatever else you want to use.

Take a Screenshot on a Timer

One of the better features of the Grab utility is that it lets you<a href="http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/01/take-a-timed-screen-shot-in-mac-os-x/"> take screenshots on a timer</a>, so you can setup an app or situation on the screen and capture things like alert boxes, menus, button actions, etc. You can also specify a timed screenshot from the Terminal:

<code>screencapture -T 10 timedshot.jpg</code>

The -T flag needs to be followed by whatever amount in seconds you want to delay the screen shot by, in that example, it’s 10 seconds which is also Grabs default.

Specify a Screen Shot File Type

Make a note that the capitalization of these flags matters, if you use a lowercase -t, you’ll be trying to specify a file type for the screenshot instead, like so:

<code>screencapture -t tiff sample.tiff</code>

You can select a variety of file types to export to, including png, pdf, tiff, jpg, and gif.

Taking a Silent Screen Shot from the Command Line

If you plan on scripting out something with the screencapture command, you might not want the shutter sound to fire. To silently take a screen shot just use the -x flag:

<code>screencapture -x quiet.jpg</code>

This is a one time thing so you’ll have to always specify -x, it’s not a permanent change to make the screen shots silent.

Send the Screen Shot to a New Mail Message

Another neat trick is sending the screenshot directly to a new Mail.app message:

<code>screencapture -M mailme.jpg</code>

This takes the screenshot, saves it as mailme.jpg, then automatically opens a new Mail message with that screenshot attached to it.

As with all command line tools, you can add the flags together to perform a variety of functions in a single command. If you want to see the other options available to you, just use the traditional -h flag with screencapture:

<code>screencapture -h</code>

This will list out all of the available flags and what they do, and there are a variety of additional options available, like <a href="http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/26/take-screen-shot-without-shadow-mac/">ditching the shadow</a>, automatically launching in Preview, choosing Window Capture mode, and more. You can see a screen shot of the screencapture commands at the top of this post (redundant?).

If you really wanted to get creative, you could do things like setup an automatic mail a screenshot function based on Mac desktop events, or even assign a key to for the clipboard function and create your own <a href="http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/">Mac Print Screen button</a> to duplicate that keyboard clutter that Windows users so dearly love, but those are topics for another post.

Finally, if you’d rather stick with the familiar Command+Shift+3 commands, don’t forget <a href="http://osxdaily.com/2011/01/26/change-the-screenshot-save-file-location-in-mac-os-x/">you can change the screen shot file type and save location</a>, but that’ll require a quick trip to the Terminal as well. That command is the same in Mac OS X 10.7 and prior versions too.

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